13 comments:

I only be happy not to have to wear the lady's dress ! I see myself already in a super market. I don't know the painter it doesn't look like a famous painting to me although I have done art school.More interesting is your story about the white house. I wonder if some European or Japanese tourist didn't buy it on a flee market perhaps and took it abroad. I'll have a look over here, you never know, the world is bigger than only the States.

OK, I was correct: Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The First of May. The Duke of Wellington Presenting a Casket on Prince Arthur's Birthday. 1851. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection, UK.

Now would this have anything to do with the Trent Affair?

Trent Affair Simultaneously the Union met and survived its first diplomatic crisis of the war, known as the Trent Affair. In the fall of 1861 the Confederacy sent James Murray Mason and John Slidell as commissioners to Britain and France. The two men ran the Northern blockade to Havana, Cuba. On November 7, 1861, they left Cuba on the British ship Trent. The next day, Captain Charles Wilkes of the U.S. vessel San Jacinto stopped the Trent, searched it, and took the two Confederate representatives on board his own ship and later to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.

The North hailed Wilkes as a hero, but by seizing the commissioners from a neutral ship, he had violated principles of international law that the United States had upheld for 50 years and had even gone to war for in 1812. The British ministry demanded an apology and the release of the two men. Many in the North clamored for war with Britain. Lincoln, however, was cautious, and in England, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, used his influence on behalf of peace. After allowing time for the war fever to cool, the United States admitted that Wilkes had acted without authorization, disavowed him, and liberated the Southern commissioners. A war that might have been fatal to the Union was thus averted.

Prince Arthur was NOT the Prince of Wales nor became King so I was interested why the subject of the painting depicted the Duke of Wellington (hero of Waterloo and past P.M.) giving him a gift?

I found this: The Duke of Wellington stood as godfather to Queen Victoria's seventh child, Prince Arthur, in 1850. The Duke of Wellington and his godson shared the same birthday, and as a toddler, young Arthur was encouraged to remind people that the Duke of Wellington was his godfather.

Actually, I teach 4th grade. You've come up with some interesting things A.M., but not the direction I'm traveling in this week, and yes.....I could make a connect to my current unit of study and this painting. :)